The tide for liturgical gay weddings is gathering strength

Diarmaid MacCulloch is professor of the history of the church at the University of Oxford

CHRIS GIBBIONS

Diarmaid MacCulloch

Saturday July 23 2016, 12.01am, The Times

I am privileged to know same-sex couples whose relationships are nearly as old as my own 64 years. When they embarked on their lives together, and I was still a child, it would have been inconceivable that they would be given any legal means of affirming and bringing proper support and security to their love for each other, let alone marriage. Yet I remember sitting a year or two back in the garden of one such couple under the shade of a mighty tree, and commenting on its splendour. “Yes,” they said, “We planted that when we moved here half a century ago.”

Now we have seen the principle of marriage equality spreading inexorably through Europe and the Americas. It began with civil partnerships, but